Ice formed on the razor wire as
police spray peaceful water protectors with a water cannon in North Dakota on
Sunday night. (Photo: Rob Wilson Photography)

Horrific
scenes have been coming out of North Dakota these last several days, where the
battle is ongoing to stop the Dakota Access pipeline. On Sunday night, police
turned tear gas and rubber bullets on hundreds of unarmed “water protectors”,
as those taking on the pipeline prefer to be called. They deployed water
cannons as well, in temperatures well below freezing. More than 160 people were injured, and many sent to
the hospital. As a result of the standoff, a young woman could lose
her arm.

For those
with a passing knowledge of the kind of tactics faced by America’s civil rights
movement, the above might sound like blast from our more brutal past. As Donald
Trump prepares to enter the White House, it should also sound like our possible
future.

"Anyone
looking for clues about what the next four years could entail should be paying
close attention to the battle over the Dakota Access pipeline."

Every
signal we have from the president-elect points to an administration defined by
three core tenets: white supremacy, unprecedented corporate influence and an
uptick in state violence. Aside from climate catastrophe, the result could be a
disturbing and dystopian new normal, where episodes like the one unfolding in
Standing Rock become all too common.

The signs
aren’t hard to spot. Breitbart News head Stephen Bannon will be chief strategist.
Jeff Sessions could be attorney general, with a resume that includes a battle
against the 14th amendment and joking about the Ku Klux Klan. Beating up
protesters was a regular fixture of Trump rallies, and one surrogate
recently referenced internment camps as a
precedent for how the Trump administration might deal with Muslim Americans.

As with
Trump’s fledgling regime, the notion that certain lives don’t matter is also at
the core of the Dakota Access pipeline. At one point slated to
run just north of Bismarck, Energy Transfer Partners rerouted the project away
from the overwhelmingly white city due to concerns about the threat it might
pose to water supplies there. Of course we can’t know exactly what ETP’s
motivations were in this case, but other fossil fuel companies have a long
history of treating indigenous and poor communities – overwhelming black and
brown neighborhoods – as sacrificial zones, where they can hide their toxic
externalities and keep profits flowing in at full speed.

Trump
hopes to streamline that process, and has invested heavily in two of the companies
behind the pipeline, Phillips 66 and ETP. Company CEO Kelcy Warren gave more than $100,000 to
the president elect through the campaign. (Warren has since relayed that he was
“very enthusiastic about what’s going to happen with our country”.) Fossil fuel
executives could reign over the Department of Energy. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie
Dimon was floated as an option to run the Treasury. The US Chamber of Commerce
is feeling optimistic, and so is Bloomberg Businessweek, whose cover this week
invited readers to “Cheer up! Business is going to be great.”

While he
ran a populist candidacy, Trump is building a cabinet for the 1%. If his
history of dealing with protests is any indication, he’ll protect their
interests – his interests – by force. At campaign events, when interrupted by
protesters, Trump reminisced about the “good old days”,
when “this doesn’t happen because they used to treat them very, very rough”.
Come January, he’ll be commander-in-chief, potentially with a man who called
Black Lives Matter an “enemy within our borders” by his side as secretary of homeland
security. With the national guard already in Standing Rock, what comes next –
in North Dakota and elsewhere – could be far more brutal than what water
protectors have faced.

Standing
Rock has for months been a frontline in the fights for indigenous sovereignty
and against reckless extraction. It may also now be the frontline of Trump’s
America. Anyone looking for clues about what the next four years could entail
should be paying close attention to the battle over the Dakota Access pipeline
– and doing everything in their power to support it.

Kate Aronoff is an organizer and freelance journalist based in
Philadelphia, PA. While in school, she worked extensively with the fossil fuel
divestment movement on the local and national level, co-founding Swarthmore
Mountain Justice and the Fossil Fuel Divestment Student Network (DSN). She is currently
working to build a student power network across Pennsylvania. Follow her on
Twitter @katearonoff

"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs